Reconsidering the Location of Innovation: Grassroots Inquiry and Educational Change

• In Event: Communities of Inquiry as Literacy Innovation: The Role of the Imagination and Local Knowledge in a Period of Common Core Standards

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores grassroots approaches to educational innovation as alternatives to the dominant entrepreneurial model, whereby market solutions are regarded as the mechanism of change. We contend that there is a need to delink automatic connections between innovation and entrepreneurship and to re-imagine the location and nature of innovation. Drawing on postcolonial theorists concerned with democratizing knowledge (Mignolo, 2011; Ngũgĩ, 2012), we explore examples from two empirical projects involving grassroots communities of inquiry, highlighting how practitioners, parents, and students develop creative ways to address issues relevant to their immediate contexts.

Frameworks: A discourse of educational innovation has been pervasive in recent charter school initiatives (Lubienski, 2003), privatization efforts, teacher education and professional development (Guskey, 2002), and the introduction of new technologies into classrooms (Zhao, Pugh, Sheldon, & Byers, 2002). As Street (1995) has conceptualized, literacy is not an autonomous technology that invariably leads to progress. Rather, there are multiple literacies related to issues of power, identity, and ideology (Bomer & Maloch, 2012; Street, 1995, 2011) that must be investigated in local contexts.
Sociocultural research in literacy situates even the latest technologies within these dynamics (e.g. Author 2, 2011; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sterponi, 2013; Noguerón-Liu, 2013; Vasudevan, Schultz, & Bateman, 2010). How might local initiatives, involving community members, teachers and students, contribute to innovative reforms in literacy education?

Methods/Data Sources: The community-based research projects documented in this paper combine elements of ethnographic immersion (Erickson, 1986; Heath & Street, 2008), participatory action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005), and practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).
We draw on data from two empirical projects that involve different forms of intergenerational inquiries into language and literacy. The first is a community-based participatory learning community on the grounds of a diverse faith-based organization serving members from the African American, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Latina/o, Italian-American, and Irish American communities in a large urban center. The second, a research collaborative made up of new and in-service English teachers and racially and ethnically diverse adolescents who have collaboratively explored art as a form of inquiry into literature. Data include video and audio taped-conversations, open-ended interviews, focus groups and classroom discussions, lesson plans, curriculum resources, and student work.

Results: Our analysis suggests how grassroots approaches to innovation encourage cooperation rather than merely competition, and involve inquiry processes that value a diversity of perspectives, especially from those most directly impacted by educational policies and practices. The examples we analyze evidence that grassroots initiatives employ critical consciousness as a form of innovation, and involve ongoing inquiries as a means of informing pedagogy and developing shared initiatives and processes relevant to teaching and learning in local contexts.

Scholarly Significance: In the spirit of this years’ conference focus on the potential of research to inform innovation, this paper will be of interest to educators and researchers concerned with addressing issues local knowledge, educational equity, and encouraging the learning and life chances of diverse individuals and communities in the midst of radical changes in the nature of literacy, educational policy, and practice.

Authors

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania